[AccessD] You Guys make Me Sick

Arthur,
Among the many things I love about you is your decidedly philosophical 
approach to life.  Mandarin Chinese!  Wonderful!  I tinker with German, 
to add it to my English and French.  But, that is not the conceptual 
leap of going from alphabet and word sequence to the pictorial 
representation of thought that you are adventuring into.  Wow!  My hat's 
off to you, my friend.
T

Tina Norris Fields
tinanfields at torchlake.com
231-322-2787

On 6/23/2012 1:08 PM, Arthur Fuller wrote:
> I guess this entire group senses that we're at a Senior Moment. I've
> checked out several new languages to learn, and finally after much to
> forget computer languages and instead learn Mandarin.
>
> Currently, I have the basics down, including the tones, but I have a long
> way to go before I could write something in Mandarin. From the alphabetic
> perspective, learning the writing scheme is a huge leap. I read a wonderful
> book called "The Man Who Loved China", about a man called Richard Needham,
> who learned to read, speak and write Mandarin in *one* year. Subsequently
> he became the world's foremost scholar on the history of China and Chinese
> science and culture.
>
> I am in awe of his first achievement, let alone the rest. I am in Year
> Three of trying and still can barely carry a polite dinner-party
> conversation. Writing about science or history in Mandarin -- well let's
> just say I don't have that many years left.
>
> Had I embarked upon this project when 20yo, I might have obtained different
> results. At age 64. the learning is a lot slower, whether it's Mandarin or
> .NET.
>
> Given my age, I concluded that I am unlikely to be hired as a .NET or PHP
> programmer; the only deep skill I have left is SQL Server and MySQL (and of
> course Access), for which, fortunately, there remain opportunities. In SQL
> Server and MySQL, I try to stay abreast; in Access I am a version -- soon
> to be two -- behind. Staying abreast of SQL Server is itself is a huge
> project.
>
> The rest of the time I want to devote to learning Mandarin, reading The New
> York Review of Books, various novels and non-fiction books (current reads
> include "Reamde" by Neal Stephenson, "Ruby on Rails Bible", "The Hot Kid"
> by Elmore Leonard, and the second edition of "The Selfish Gene", by Richard
> Dawkins. That's the list for the next ten days; I read all of them a bit
> per day.
>
> I ought to add that I'm also trying to learn Alpha Five v11, and also
> spending some time watching its tutorial vids and trying things out.
>
> Currently I have a part-time gig done remotely, a few hours a week. It
> boosts my income modestly and I am happy to devote so relatively little to
> a project. Of course, this is a myth, since some of both my waking and
> sleeping hours (unbillable) are devoted to reconsidering problems related
> to the project. However, this is the life we have chosen. Develop or die!
> Semper fi!
>
> Arthur